Hi Everyone!

I’ve been working here at the Chicago Botanic Garden working with an REU student and volunteers and it’s been very action packed! We’re working on a project that looks at local adaptation in Sporobolus airoides and how that may play out in root traits.  It’s definitely been a learning experience in mentoring and I’ve really enjoyed it. It’s also been a good lesson in time management as I’ve just submitted my MS thesis this morning! I’m putting some pictures below of the gardens here, it’s been really nice to have such a beautiful backyard to go to for a break (which I’m sure you all know to be true!).

It was really foggy for a while:

I hope you all are enjoying your time!

Alicia

Chicago Botanic Garden

Hi all!

This is the first post of my internship. I started working in Pinedale, Wyoming the first week of June. I am from the east coast so Wyoming is a whole new experience for me but it has been great so far! I am lucky to have mountain ranges in almost every direction I look. The Wyoming Range is to the West, the Wind Rivers are to the East and the Gros Ventre (pronounced “grow vont”) and Tetons are to the North. It is beautiful out here and the recreation opportunities are fantastic. Camping, hiking, fishing, rafting, climbling, and kayaking are just some of the things I plan on my weekends.

Fremont Lake – Just outside Pinedale

I am a wildlife biology intern this summer and I have already had plenty to learn. Plant identification is what has been taking up a lot of the space in my mind so far. I work for the BLM so I have been able to go out and do vegetation transects on grazing allotments. There are plenty of forbs and grasses to learn out there and you don’t just learn one name but the common name, scientific name, USDA code, and any other short hand your co-workers come up with! It has been very enlightening since I spent most of my time focusing on animal names but you learn quickly when you are collecting the data every day.

Out doing transects

Phlox multiflora – One of my favorites

I have also been lucky enough to work with the Game and Fish department out here and help do vegetation monitoring on treated sites and radio telemetry on elk.

Elk transmitter – finding birth locations

The main project that the wildlife seasonal and I will be working on this summer is a Lynx Habitat Inventory in the Wyoming Range up on Deadline Ridge, a very encouraging name don’t you think? We have more plants to learn but identifying the tree species has come a bit quicker for me than identifying grasses. We have only gone out a few days now but I can’t complain about hiking in some nice tree stands!

Pinedale is a pretty small town but there are plenty of management offices around, including the BLM, Wyoming Game and Fish, the National Forest Service, and the Sublette County Conservation District. It has been nice to be able to help with projects from different groups and to meet all the other seasonal employees. This weekend is the Green River Rendezvous festival in Pinedale that is supposed to relive the history of the Mountain Man. There should be food, horses, mountain men, a parade, and arts and crafts. For a small town, Pinedale does a good job of entertaining!

http://www.pinedaleonline.com/RendezvousDays.HTM

So all in all, I am having an amazing time but I have to go get ready for the Rodeo!

BLM – Pinedale, Wyoming

“The heat has come, the rains are gone. I begin to feel the wind rustling through my white hair. It is almost time to let it go, to let it succumb to the wind.  As grasses around tickle me and sprinkle me with bits of shade, I hold tight to the ground and stand strong.  Day after day I do this for it is all that I know. And yet there is a freedom in the life that I live, a freedom to just be in the open air. I often wonder what it would be like to stand a few centimeters to the south, but alas, I am rooted to my spot and so I hold onto it with pride. Occasionally my friends around me get trampled by large dark beasts; I am so grateful that it hasn’t happened yet to me.  Suddenly, something unusual appears, a dark shadow creeping over me, and I fruitlessly brace myself for the impact of one of the beasts. What happens, though, is unexpected; some force gently handles my body and plucks the hair, my offspring, away from me. ‘Bye bye babies!’  I think, then it’s back to bobbing in the breeze. “  –Antennaria microphylla (my first seed collection)

Antennaria microphylla

I am very thankful that this internship has given me the opportunity to spend my days searching for and studying plants (and spending time making up corny plant stories). Sometimes that involves ripping them apart and counting the number of segments into which a carpal is divided, or seeing the results of a sagebrush reseeding project, or eating a yucca bud and enjoying the spicy aftertaste. I still cannot believe that I am getting paid to do this.

Every day that goes by, I realize how important plants are to the world and to my interests. This past week we had a biologists’ tour at our office with folks from all over the state to get together and discuss the work we’ve been doing, problems that have arisen, and how different people have dealt with them. It was an excellent opportunity to meet a group of dedicated individuals who care deeply about biology and sharing their knowledge and also to have a bit of fun.

I was super excited to have the chance to meet our state bontanist (yay plant people), who is well versed in the Seeds of Success program and just about everything else. I learned about wasp larvae causing galls in sagebrush, possible genetic crossover between white bark and limber pines, and most importantly how to get rid of prickly pear (Opuntia spp.)bristles (glochids). I won’t keep it a secret, if you rub it against your hair, there is something about the oils that makes them disappear like magic (it really works, I tried it!). Most of the biologists at this meeting were wildlife people, though (not that I have anything against them), which made me realize how much the plant world is underrepresented.  Thankfully there was at least one plant person from whom I could glean a bit of plant information. I thought back to our class in Chicago with Peggy Olwell who stressed the same idea, that our government agencies often forget about the plants and focus mainly on the conservation of animals.

As much as animals are important, they couldn’t exist without their habitats, which are comprised mainly of plants. I think the wildlife biologists know that, too, since a lot of their work involves habitat restoration.  We visited a field near a critical sage grouse habitat that had been leased to a farmer to grow wheat for a few years. In return, the farmer was to use the native seeds that the BLM supplied and after spraying the invasive grasses on the land, reseed the next year.  Unfortunately, the farmer has yet to complete his end of the bargain and the field lies fallow with only crested wheat grass (Agropyron cristatum)and cheat grass (Bromus tectorum) dominating. Since cheat grass is an early annual, it will be difficult without more herbicide applications to get native plants re-established. This is one of the many stories of the trials and tribulations (or should I say challenges) of working for a multi-use land agency. But back to my point that wildlife need plants in order to be maintained.  I did learn that in Montana we have our own greenhouse (not technically, it’s contracted) near the state office in Billings growing thousands of native seedlings getting ready for restoration projects, yay! Some of the seed I that I collect will end up growing there; I feel like a plant mother whose children are going off to school (not yet, but at least by next year hopefully).

I also realized that I need a better camera for taking pictures and to remember to actually bring it.

So long for now.

One of the island mountain ranges, the Judiths.

It’s a bee’s heaven

Greetings from Grand Junction! While my mentor was gone for a week I had the awesome opportunity to go out in the field to help work on various projects, such as a migrating birds survey and the famous Sagegrouse Habitat Assessment Framework. But now I’m back in the groove of surveying different areas for the threatened Colorado Hookless Cactus (Sclerocactus glaucus) with a fellow non-CLM intern. We’ve been hiking these mountain bike trails in an area called Tabeguache for a race in August called the ‘Epic Bike Race’ and for the Colorado Mesa University Bike Race. Unfortunately, we did find one right on the edge of the trail so I’ll probably have to monitor that during the race. We’ve also been looking for them in the North Desert in Grand Junction which is a highly used OHV recreation area. Imagine steep rolling desert hills interspersed with pipelines and oil drills. We’re stuck with a small manual 4-WD truck so it seems like we spend more time trying to get up hills and getting stuck than looking for cactus. But on our first day we got lucky and I spotted these monsters from the window:

These are the largest we’ve seen yet and the biggest clump of them together! It was pretty exciting. So that’s pretty much all I’ve been doing. Putting on my cactus glasses and getting dizzy from staring out the window for them. On a side note: I went to Moab to visit Canyonlands and Arches National Parks last weekend and it was 107 degrees! I can’t believe how hot it gets here. When we hike we have to leave at 6am and it’s still blistering hot by 10am. Hopefully we’ll get some monsoonal rains this weekend…

Lindsey Bargelt
BLM Grand Junction Field Office

Hello from Twin Falls Idaho!
After my first month and a half of this internship I am proud to say that Habitat Assessment Framework (HAF) sites for sage-grouse are completed! We as a monitoring crew worked very hard performing these monitorings. We oftentimes camped out in order to complete all of the HAF sites we needed to before it became too hot and dry in the Southern Idaho Summer! Monitoring these HAF sites was a very dilligent and sometimes tedious endeavour. For these HAF sites we measured the point-cover and perrenial forb densities of two 50M transects located 90 degrees from each other. Many of the sites that needed to be monitored were located in rather remote locations and required us to walk over a mile just to reach them. I am very proud of the monitoring crew that I am on for being able to complete these sites before the perrenial forbs dried up. The experience and knowledge that I gained by monitoring these sites is invaluable and will help me to understand more of what a job in natural resources requires.

We as a monitoring crew will now be performing wetland inventory and riparian monitoring. I am looking forward to learning more about where water is available in this desert landscape and learning about the various species that exist in these types of habitats.

Throughout this internship I have gained so much understanding of just how delicate yet adaptable our wildlands are. By being in direct contact with our rangelands I feel like I can understand the effects of different elements on our environment and what we can do to manage them.

Until later,

Holt Bright

Hello all, this is my first post. I’m at the BLM Las Cruces District Office in southern New Mexico. Unlike most CLM interns, I did not move here for the internship—I’ve been here for a decade. I went to grad school at New Mexico State University and, since graduating, have been trying to stick around one way or another. I may be biased, but there just aren’t many places that can compete with southern New Mexico. We have desert, mountains, lots of biodiversity, and lots of public land. It’s rarely cold, but can get a little warm in the summer. If we’re lucky, we get both winter and summer rains. Las Cruces is a bit too close to Texas, but no place is perfect.

Since starting my internship a month ago, the bulk of my time has gone to training of various kinds: getting the various necessary authorizations to drive governmental vehicles and whatnot, learning not to poke / sniff / eat potentially hazardous substances found in the desert, being baffled by the various different shared hard drives and physical filing systems in use, familiarizing myself with the many intricacies of NEPA and the ESA, getting to know ArcGIS (I’ve spent plenty of time with GIS, but not Arc), and so on and so forth. After a decade in the area I already know the plants fairly well, so that part of the learning curve isn’t too steep. Since none of that is terribly exciting, here are some photographs from one of my days in the field.

On June 15th, Mike Howard (state botanist for NM BLM and one of my two mentors) and I went out to the Brokeoff Mountains to look at Dermatophyllum guadalupense, a rare leguminous shrub. Mike has been nailing down the precise distribution of this species, so we checked a couple of questionable localities. The Brokeoff Mountains are mostly limestone (or limestone-ish things like dolomite), only get up to 6,600 feet elevation or so, and are mostly untreed:

While there, I took some pictures of Mortonia scabrella, a shrub that is abundant in the Brokeoff Mountains but otherwise rarely found in New Mexico. My long-term goal is to photograph all plant species that occur in New Mexico. This puts me one closer to that goal:

We then headed over to Alkali Lakes (a note to readers not familiar with New Mexico: the word “lake” generally indicates a place where water might theoretically pool given sufficient rainfall rather than an existing body of water) to get some stem cuttings of Lepidospartum burgessii, a shrub found only on gypsum at Alkali Lakes. We sent the cuttings off for tissue culture, since Lepidospartum burgessii rarely, if ever, produces viable seed. Possibly this is a reason it is rare. In any case, it would be convenient if we had some way to propagate the thing. Unfortunately, we heard a couple of days ago that these cuttings have not done well in tissue culture—most have succumbed to fungi. Fortunately, this is an excuse to go outside again to get more cuttings. I don’t have pictures of Alkali Lakes or Lepidospartum burgessii, so here’s a collared lizard:

This is round two for me as a CLM intern, and a lot has changed since the first time around. For one, this blog. People blog? I didn’t realize this was a thing, and someone would actually be interested in what I do on a daily basis. The mundane rituals of sipping coffee and debating the finer points of seed collection and soil fertility. Which, apparently, is interesting to someone, somewhere in the greater cosmos of plant nerdom.  Therefore, I venture forth with constructing these blog entries detailing my occupational duties, because, who doesn’t like a good botany story, right?

So, what I do. At present, I am the Conservation Land Management Intern (Botanist) for the Taos Field Office, Bureau of Land Management, New Mexico. Whew. It’s a mouthful. Glad that’s over. What this all means: I was lucky enough to be selected for a three year position via CLM to govern the Seeds of Success Program (SOS) for the Taos Field Office. Additionally, there is a new national monument (Rio Grande del Norte) which has some rare plants and could use a few veg treatments here and there. Lastly, there is an historic ranch outside of Santa Fe which is available to grow native seed on. This is what I’m most excited for, playing in the dirt and literally seeing the fruits of my labor. To bring it full circle, the seed collected via SOS will be grown out at the ranch and used for restoration/reclamation at the district level. Waaaay cool. It’ll be nice to use locally harvested, locally grown seed on local projects. Hopefully, this will lead to greater success on restoration projects, because seed is already acclimated to the general area.

Overall, I’ve been prepping for next year and technicians to collect seed. Lots of supply ordering, list development. I have gone to the field a couple times, toured the countryside and taken in a New Mexico lightning storm. Granted, I’ve only been here about two weeks, most of which is spent doing things like driver’s training and information systems security. BUT, I have learned a few things about New Mexico. There’s a state question: red or green? Which refers to chili types, which you can get on just about everything. The appropriateness of which I have yet to decide (chili wine?). New Mexico has its own lingo and uses Spanish to describe things, i.e. acequia. An acequia is an irrigation ditch. That’s it. A ditch. Acequia rolls off the tongue and has far more linguistic charisma than ditch, but thrown quickly into casual conversation you wonder if someone is inviting you to partake in a delicious wine or some sort of afternoon activity involving a pool. I suppose such colloquialisms will come in time.

Whelp, I don’t have much else to report. Drudging through ordering SOS supplies and piles of requisition forms. The upcoming months should be more rousing. More plants. More dirt.

Until next month,

JD

Since departing Chicago, the Alaskan summer season is gaining momentum and, consequently, my work has guided me to a number of breathtakingly beautiful locations. The Friday I returned home, we (I, my co-intern, and a group of AK NHP staff) ascended Sheep Mountain in search of any interesting or uncommon calcophiles that might be growing along its steep, gypsum-talus slopes. As you can see, stunning scenery abounds on and around Sheep Mountain, and my co-intern even spotted an uncommon Oxytropis, O. huddelsonii.

Looking N at Sheep Mountain from “the parking lot”

Looking S from a bench on Sheep Mountain toward Mount Thor

Crazy cool rocks of Sheep Mountain

After finishing up some FORVIS walkthroughs at Campbell Creek Science Center here in Anchorage, the following week sent us to Fairbanks for two (grey, rainy) days of training, for ATVs and NRCS Botany protocols, respectively. We used the return drive as an opportunity to scout for potential SOS collection sites. After a very long day of travel and scouting, we set out to explore our final site of the day, and I suddenly found myself butt-deep in mud while trying to cross a stream. I’m not sure whether it was genuinely funny or a byproduct of delirium, but it’s been a long time since I’ve laughed that hard. Good ol’ field memories in the making. (Ah, the wonderful feeling of cool mud in your XtraTufs!) All in all, our scouting trip was moderately successful. Even when we were unsuccessful, though, it’s hard to grow discouraged with the Alaska range smiling down at you.

Site #1 – Donnelly Creek Recreation Area

Site #2 – Gunnysack Creek

This week, I’m alone at the NHP, mounting specimens and helping one of my mentors with some morphometrics research, while my co-intern is out in the Yukon Flats with NRCS. I’m a bit of an herbarium nerd, so I’m excited to spend some quality time here before shipping out to Sitkinak Island with NRCS next week.

Until next month, fellow CLMers!

Life in Colorado has been great since my last entry. Work has picked up and I am learning a lot. I went down to Boulder for (PFC) Riparian Assesment training which was very cool. We are done spraying invasives until the fall, so we are now starting monitoring and managment. We just got new GPS units that are very slick and fun to use. I have been going out to back roads on BLM land and collecting data point with the GPS to mark down invasive weed sites. Last week my mentor and I went up to Yarmony Mountain (which we sprayed several times earlier on) to put in some photo plots and to do some grazing utilization. We also met with some permitees up in North Park, CO who we work closesly with to manage grazing land and watershed rights. They were great and had a really respectful relationship with our BLM office, as they had been working with us for a very long time. It was nice to see the BLM and ranchers working well together, especially when all you hear about are the Bundy type situations. The older ranchers really seemed to understand our motive and said they manage the land as if it was their own. It was refreshing to hear and see. If we help them out, they help us out.

Soon we will be floating the Colorado to do some invasive monitoring/spraying with water friendly herbicide. I also contacted a professor out of CSU about possibly working with my mentor and I to combat cheatgrass becasue he and his graduate students are working on some research that would help establish native seeds to best outcompete cheatgrass. I am learning a lot here and am making good contacts. The weekends are pretty spectacular too. Kremmling is a small town, but it is surrounded by wilderness. Froma natural resource point of view it is a great field office to work in.

Some pictures from the past few weeks:

Pearl Lake, Steamboat

Zirkell Wilderness

State Flower

Spraying

Eagles Nest Wilderness

Hahn Peak

Work in North Park

Never Summer Wilderness At Work

Moose Sighting #1

Kremmling, CO Field office

BLM

-Ben

My responsibilities working for the BLM this summer mostly consist of vegetation monitoring. So far I have been conducting the 17 indicator health assessment on rangelands to begin the permit renewal process for Cow/Calf producers and sheep producers that run on public land. I have also had the opportunity to participate in MIM (Multiple indicator Monitoring) on stream banks. This is a test of bank stability by plant composition and species.